


second verse, same as the first

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Allusions to Babies, American Politics, F/M, Married Couple, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 03, References to Drugs, Sorkin Give Me the Revival I Personally Deserve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22855573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Ten days before Super Tuesday, 2020, Will McAvoy becomes a Democrat.
Relationships: Will McAvoy/MacKenzie McHale
Comments: 21
Kudos: 95





	second verse, same as the first

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Dedicated to twitter user @davisessies, and also my wife.

“Will people even be shocked? I’ve been running roughshod over the party since 2010. It’s been a whole decade of Will McAvoy pissing off the Republicans. It’s a formality.”

Sometimes, you are standing in your bedroom with your wife, arguing with her as you have almost every damn day for ten years. The bedroom has changed a few times in ten years, both in location and decor but the basics remain the same, Will thinks. It’s familiar, arguing with Mac like this is familiar. Him standing on the left side of the bed, unbuttoning the shirt he wore to work in order to slingshot it into the hamper at the end of the bed. Her, punting her heels towards a shoe rack that perhaps, at one time, held shoes rather than serving as a goalpost for well-worn Louboutins to land around.

Arguing is perhaps too strong of a word for hard headed people like them. There’s no resentment or pain behind their passion. Their conversations ebb and flow between two natural magnetic poles, and any miscommunication regarding which one they are headed towards is tidied up after with a sincere apology. 

These days, anyway. 

“And since when have formalities been unimportant?” Mac asks, her gabardine-lined skirt sliding to the floor. “The Democrats impeached Trump as a formality.” 

“And? All it did was give more oxygen to our Narcissist-in-Chief’s flame.” He drops to his side of the bed with a huff. He pulls his foot into his lap in order to pick apart the knot of his shoelaces. 

But he gets it. He does. 

When nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do. 

He shifts on top of the duvet, angling himself so that he can see Mac’s face, half cast in shadows. She’s standing, eyes closed, rolling her shoulders and then her neck. It’s been a long day, a long month, and he can hear the snap-crackle-pop of the tendons in her cervical spine from where he sits. 

MacKenzie’s professional life has been an exercise in patriotic futility. 

“Our wedding was a formality,” she finally counters on a sigh as she unhooks her bra. 

He easily picks up the conversational thread, weaving a lighter tone. She hurts. “Our wedding was a  _ technicality,  _ there’s a difference.”

“You’re pedantic,” she complains in a way he finds thoroughly lovely. 

“The word is lawyer, hon.” 

He smiles, she smiles. They put on their sleep clothes, she steals his large and fuzzy robe despite having one of her own hanging in their en suite. 

“Pedant,” she accuses again, once they settle under the covers, where all their finest bickering has historically taken place. 

Will, however, is distracted by the smell of her hair. 

They were awoken this morning by Josie creeping into their bedroom with the kind of stealth that God only reserves for Navy Seal teams and toddlers imminently poised to vomit on an antique rug and the hours of six and seven slipped by in a frantic slew of over the counter medications, pedialyte, and phone calls to two different relief nannies. 

In the chaos of a sick three-year-old and two other children to get ready for their regular nanny to take to school, Mac hadn’t had the time to shower, and instead gave her roots a solid coating of dry shampoo before spraying perfume on her brush and running it through her hair. 

Will likes his wife’s perfume, and has more than once gotten just enough transfer of it from her neck to his shirt that he’s stopped in the middle of the bullpen and looked around, searching for her presence beside him. 

He hums, nosing along her hairline. “It’s not pedantic to say that a Republican and a Democrat are two different things.”

“Thank you, that’s what I’ve been trying to say.” 

Sliding a hand over the dip of her waist, he flattens his palm against her bellybutton.  _ Sleeping like spoons _ , is what Charlotte used to call it when she was smaller. There are a handful of phrases they’ve pilfered from their children, cutesy and not to be repeated to anyone outside of their marriage. 

“No, I know -- this was my idea, I’d like to remind you.”

“You immediately backtracked,” she points out, not at all trying to be helpful. 

“We have children!” He bites at her shoulder, petulant. “Three, young children, and I would like to--”

“I wouldn’t mind having Lonny around again,” She muses, wriggling in his grasp. “Or do you think he’s gotten out of the personal security industry? Something a little more routine, perhaps. Like bouncing at a club. Or maybe that’s even more random, you don’t know--”

Will’s mind flashes to Lonny standing, chest-puffed out, in front of a grimy bar with blacked out windows in the Village.

“Lonny was special forces in a previous life, I doubt he’s bouncing  _ at a club.”  _

“It could be a nice club,” Mac counters. “A country club.” 

“Mac, have you ever been to a country club?”

It’s always seemed like any time she got close to reaching the level of their profession where invitations to those kinds of events seemed assured, she fled the country. And now as the President of ACN, she’s above them. 

“No,” she answers blithely, “the court at St. James would have barred our entry had we ever stepped foot into one, and you know mother was so intent on us all marrying into the peerage.” 

He snorts.

“What happened?”

“Turns out we’re part Irish.” She turns in his arms until she’s lying on her back, one leg frog-legged out to stretch her hip. “It’s why I settled with you, remember? Honey, we do this bit at least once a year to see her turn red and try to pretend that middle class means the same thing in the UK as it does here.”

“Did you settle with me because I’m Irish or because I’m a felon?”

_ Something something, irish stoicism,  _ he thinks.

“Technically a felon.” 

“It was a formality.” One that will be in the first line of his obituary, but a formality nonetheless.

Mac turns her face until they are laying almost forehead to forehead, and quirks a single brow. “A formality that you left me pregnant and alone while you were in prison?”

Scoffing, he flops onto his back. “We didn’t know you were pregnant and you were hardly alone and  _ how did I end up married to Charlie Skinner?”  _

“Who else would you have married? All sons marry their fathers.”

“They really don’t.” 

It’s Mac turn to follow him, rolling over until her chin is resting on his chest, her arm slung over his chest, her fingers drawing lazy shapes on his left bicep. “Maybe Teddy will.”

“I hope not, for his sake.” If Teddy ends up with a man, he can only hope it’s one who is far less neurotic than him. In fact, may that be true for his daughters, too. “Also, returning to the original point of this conversation--”

“We had one?” she asks, giving him an out. 

“This was your idea,” he grouses, and watches her spin back up behind her eyes, because it’s her turn to be spun up.

“Billy,” she says, jabbing her fingernail into his armpit, making him jump, “it was your idea to register as a Republican and work for the first Bush administration and be publically a Republican during the _second_ _Bush administration_ , it was your idea to register as a Democrat during the segment.” 

He wants her to hold his feet to the fire, he always has. 

“I can’t do this lying down,” he mumbles. 

For half a second, Mac looks at him with her head tilted, and he realizes she doesn’t know if he meant that literally or figuratively before deciding that maybe he does need to get up. 

Knees popping, he gets out of bed -- there’s a quarter of a bottle of sauvignon blanc that they didn’t finish with dinner. Besides, they can be louder in the kitchen than they can in their bedroom. More floors between them and the kids. So they creep downstairs, then down more stairs, and don’t speak until the wine is poured into a stemless glass and Mac has started rooting around the drawers of their freezer for a hidden container of ice cream.

Will takes a long sip of wine. 

“It’s important to draw your line in the sand and report the facts when the facts have gone to the fucking zoo.”

“It’s only what I’ve been trying to get you to do for ten whole years,” she replies, opening cardboard boxes purporting to be filled with vegetables and faux chicken tenders and putting them back. “They’ve given us awards for it even, but you keep insisting that going to prison was more important than those.”

“The sticking to our morals bit was more important than any award we’ve won, not the prison bit.” The nannies know better than to eat Mac’s ice cream, so Will isn’t overly concerned with offering to help her find it. “If we’re splitting hairs, we didn’t even get any awards for the story that got me sent to prison”

“One could argue it’s our profession.”

“Going to prison? Because you haven’t yet but if you want to take on the Trump DOJ and obstruct their version of justice, we’ll have to talk about childcare but I’m down.” 

He takes another long swig of wine, staring her down when she unbends and glares at him.

“No, splitting hairs,” she clarifies, taking care with her t’s. 

“But…” 

It’s not what Mac thinks he’s concerned about. It’s really not. He’s not concerned about losing viewers, or retribution from the White House and Capitol Hill, or the threats of violence. If they lose viewers, they’ll gain others. If Trump wants to take pot shots at him, well, he’s been beating his associates in court since the 1980s. The death threats? They hire security.

There are far braver people than him with far fewer resources.

“But?”

She’s finally found her ice cream. Looking askance at him, she pads over to the silverware drawer and retrieves a spoon before choosing a seat at the island.

“I will still be a Democrat whether I register online in our bedroom right now or fill out a form at the anchor desk in front of one-point-three million people.”

It’s performative, and possibly will come off as either facetious or condescending. 

Mac nods. “Yes.” 

“But?” 

“But…” She looks at him, face wide and open and honest as it’s ever been.

And a little bit mean.

He sighs. “I looked up one day and realized I was no longer responsible for being the party’s sane man when the entire party has gone to hell in a handbasket! That by speaking as if it wasn’t beyond the moral fucking event horizon was going to keep people voting for a Republican Party that cannot, by any means, pretend to lean on the fact that it was once the party of Lincoln! Nothing fucking matters anymore! I have been called a purveyor of fake news for reporting stone cold facts to which I say: hell no, I will not abide!” 

“And if you get shot?” she asks.

It’s a legitimate question. People have tried.

People have tried  _ recently.  _

But she has to ask, even flippantly. They have children now, some of them even on purpose.

“You’ve been stabbed!” he half yells, and dutifully she nods. It took until after their second child, but he finally impressed upon her that even if it was something that had come to take up little emotional space in her life,  _ he _ still wakes up in the middle of the night from dreams where her body lays grey on pavement, like a puppet with its strings cut. “I’ve been to prison!” 

“That’s right, honey, you sure have.”

Just like his father before him -- a joke for another night.

For the same other night that he sure would call her out on how she came  _ this close  _ to a meltdown over him being in cushy Manhattan lock up, but not tonight.

But he could, and that’s what matters.

“I’m a goddamn motherfucking journalist!” He finishes his wine, placing the empty glass on top of the butcher block countertop with emphatic force. 

“You’re a good one, even,” she suggests. 

“And I’m a Democrat!” 

_ Oh God,  _ he thinks, the ghosts of a hundred dead Nebraskan relatives breathing down the back of his neck. He had his first snarled lecture on farm subsidies in the cradle, had the planks of the Republican Party platform beaten into him in a cornfield. His father had tried to pull himself up by the bootstraps so many times that they broke, and so he broke their family. 

And he broke a bottle across his father’s face.

“It hurt you to say that, didn’t it?”

“A little bit, yeah.” It’s not hurt, but the revenant of his father -- so it’s close enough to call it one and the same. “It’s not my job to fix the party. There is no one left who can fix the party. The responsible thing to do is to leave.” 

“The children will be very proud of you when you get shot.”

He regrets finishing the wine, because his only other option is to open another bottle, which seems drastic. Instead, he rounds the island, sits on the barstool next to her, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“I won’t get shot,” she says, laying her head on his shoulder. 

“Eh, you could get shot.” He places his hands on the counter, looks sideways at her, glossy brown hair falling over the line of his shoulder where her cheek rests. “We could all get shot.” 

It’s a visage that keeps him up at night, from time to time. The platonic ideal of a gunman, charging into the room with a semi-automatic rifle under his hoodie. The setting is variable -- the newsroom, the children’s school, a museum. Will knows rationally that there are security guards and scanners and bag searches at these kinds of places, but aren’t there always? Don’t people always get killed anyway? 

How many parents of slaughtered children has he spoken to, since Sandy Hook? 

“Nah, I’m buying us all flak jackets and writing it off as a business expense,” he quips. “What’s the worst Trump can do? Tweet at me? I don’t run my Twitter account. Throw me in jail? Been there, done that.”

He keeps telling himself it’s not a big deal. MSNBC throws down the gauntlet at least weekly. The  _ Times  _ and CNN can’t go a day without being referred to as fake news. And it’s not that ACN has been spared its own incidents of being tarred and feathered in the right wing blogosphere it’s that… 

This is him, giving up on over thirty years of work trying to save the party from men like John McAvoy and drag it back to the center.

He has the strongest resume, more than any other journalist, to make this determination.

The Republican Party is a lost cause.

There is of course, the perennial thorn in their sides, their boss of bosses. For the first six years of her tenure, under the duration of her first contract as the President of ACN, Mac was grandfathered into the clause that Charlie had slid into the purchase deal: she could not, under any circumstances, be fired. But now, eight months into her second contract, that is no longer the case. 

“Pruitt?” Will asks. 

She had deftly shielded them all from the bastard for seven years -- but this was beyond anything they had put on the air before.

Mac shakes her head, returning her attention to her ice cream. “Don’t worry about him.”

“You say that, and then…”

She hums and scrunches up her nose, and he knows she’s trying to figure out a way to lie without lying. “He and I have come to an understanding after the last election cycle.”

“Do I want to know what the understanding is?” 

He knows that he doesn’t, but as her husband it’s his duty to ask.

“I haven’t been fired yet,” she replies with a shrug. 

His lips curl into a facsimile of a smile, remembering the countless unforgiving and tiresome days that end with her in frustrated tears, wishing for the man’s death and plotting his downfall. “Pruitt fires you at least six times before breakfast on a good day, you just somehow manage to bounce back by lunch.” 

“He knows it would be worse if he didn’t sign my paychecks.” 

Will truly and deeply believes that. His wife is pernicious in opposition.

“Oh, he fears you now.” 

She hums, spinning up another half-truth. “Sometimes when I’m displeased I make sure to walk by his office on my way to have lunch with Reese and let his assistant know where I’m going.” 

Eyebrows rising towards his hairline, he leans back in his seat and looks at her. 

“You have lunch with Reese?” 

“Sometimes I eat a sandwich while Reese complains about how Leona refuses to die until AWM buys back ACN.” She offers him a spoonful of ice cream, and he accepts, biting down around a chunk of cookie dough. “We’re going to have to find a blue tie for you to wear and touch up your roots. Otherwise the blue will wash you out. No pinstripes.” 

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“No, I know where to buy ties and I know how to book you an appointment with a hair stylist.” 

“Mac, when was the last time you went to a store to buy  _ anything? _ ” She has a whole fleet of assistants and interns now, and that’s just at work. When both you and your spouse regularly put in double-digit hours into a work day  _ and  _ want to be able to spend time with your children, the solution is often a rota, a household staff, and subscription services for every kind of delivery from groceries to prescriptions.

She pretends to ponder the question around a mouthful of Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked. “Sometime between when Teddy and Josie were born.” 

“That’s what I thought,” he answers barblessly, because the better question is when was the last time  _ he  _ went into a store to buy anything. “This is going to be bigger than the American Taliban. If we thought America was divided in 2010… it’s not state against state this time, Mac. It’s not the toppling of one institution.” 

He stands, by habit. If he’s not reading a teleprompter or speaking to someone on a live feed, his instincts punt him back to law school and he must stand and argue his case, even if it’s only to his wife, nodding with him every point he makes. She’s always liked to watch him work a camera, work a room -- couldn’t live with him if she didn’t. 

Warm brown eyes follow his hand as he conducts a symphony of his ire in front of their refrigerator. A jeremiad of the demise of the GOP he’s spent the entirety of his adult life tending to. 

“If we still allowed caning on the Senate floor we’d already be in the middle of a Civil War. Republicans have lost the ability to see anyone not like them as human. We have thrown out the  _ rule of law.  _ They have hijacked our entire form of government! The only thing that matters to them is their proximity to power and the size of the cudgel that they need to remain there. It’s over. The American experiment has failed. I am calling time of death, and I am going to do it live.” 

And change his party affiliation, which seems like it should be a less salient detail. 

Hopping off the bar stool, Mac’s bare feet land noisily on the tile floor. She walks until she is standing right in front of him, leaning up onto her toes until their noses brush. Then, she reaches in between them, and places the cardboard pint in the palm of his hand. 

He snorts, hides it away in an empty box that once held tilapia filets, and when he faces her again she tilts her head to one side. 

“So now what?” she asks.

_ What?  _

“What?”

Her face rebukes him, but only in a way that doesn’t hurt his feelings. It’s as hyperbolic as they always are to each other, except for when they aren’t.

“What’s next? You’re Will McAvoy. Use your big brain.” Leaning into him, she slides her hands into the pockets of his pajama pants. “What’s next?” 

He blinks.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know,” she pushes, and steps away from him, leaving him feeling bereft enough to follow her as she walks into the dining room and trail her into the living room at the front of the brownstone. Turning, she stands with her back to the front windows, grey pillars of light cast off from the street lamps streaming in through the curtains. “You left your father’s house at seventeen. What’s next?”

Will doesn’t know. He’s never known. He follows  _ her  _ lead, not the other way around.

“You run away to New York City for school and develop a coke habit that gets you through most of the 80s until you burn out and decide to go into speech writing because you think no one will ever love you anyway?” 

Features contorting into a displeased grimace, she scoffs. “Don’t be irreverent.” 

“I’m not the person to answer this.” He gesticulates, stepping over an abandoned coven of half-dressed Barbie dolls to get closer to her. 

He’s got a lot of mileage on his conscience already, about who he’s managed to save and who he hasn’t. 

It can’t be him, who has to say this. 

But it _ is _ him.

She gestures back, meeting him in the middle. “If not you, then who? Who else is qualified? You walked out the house of an abusive, malignant narcissist and look at you now. Look at the life you’ve built.”

Blood pounding in his ears, Will realizes Mac led him to this part of their home on purpose. 

Sometimes he looks around, and thinks of all the ways his children haven’t had to grown up yet. 

“It took me over thirty years,” he offers plaintively, not truly arguing with her. 

“And you beat Reconstruction, look at that.”

His resulting laugh is low and dire, his eyes flickering from a dollhouse to a security blanket to a basket full of stuffed animals. There is a bucket of broken crayons and colored pencils scribbled down to a flat nub on the coffee table, reams of paper littering the surface. A discarded juice box lays abandoned on the rug. 

“There’s a carpetbagging joke in there somewhere, I can almost reach it.” 

Mac’s hands find her hips. 

“Will.” 

“No, seriously Mac. I almost have it.” Maybe if he keeps trying to make a joke, she’ll stop. He knows this to not be likely, but he’s willing to try. 

Her expression communicates to him that it’s not working.

“What?” he asks, softly.

“People need to know they’re not crazy,” she says. “The people who have been the party faithful their whole lives, the other people who are now looking up and realizing that being the Good Republican is no longer an option, that if they stay long enough that it’ll get better is no longer an option -- they need to know they’re not crazy. Help the gay kid in a cornfield in Kansas--”

“Wheatfield in Kansas, but that’s neither here nor there.” 

The resulting glare, for reasons Will is not ever going to examine, tows him closer to her.

“--Know they’re not crazy. Help the trans kid forced to go to church three times a week to hear that who they are is a sin from the pulpit. Help the college kid who realizes there’s no going home again because they don’t recognize their parents. Show every black and Latino viewer that we’re not pretending that isn’t totally fucking insane.” Every molecule in her body is bursting with earnestness, it’s in her chemical makeup. When he cups her hips, she sways towards him. “Americans  _ need _ to know they’re not crazy.” 

“Don’t you think we just might be the wrong people to tell them that?” he asks, know that it’s a stupid question. Mac has never asked herself that question in her life, and if she has, she’s always answered it in the negative. 

She’s the one with the Peabody’s, after all. 

“Because we’re crazy or because we’re straight white multi-millionaires?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, because they both are valid points. 

He needs to hear her tell him no. 

And she does: “We can’t make everyone else do the hard work.” 

“Yeah. I know.” Sighing, he kisses her forehead, and then her nose. “And if anyone asks us why now?”

Her lips quirk into a mischievous, albeit familiar, grin. “Because we just decided to.” 

_ God _ , he thinks, stooping down to catch her mouth with his. _ I really did marry Charlie.  _

(His wife is his favorite person in the universe.)

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be wandering back into the ether now.


End file.
